And Now a Few Words on the Wisconsin Senate Circus

Most Read

While most of the attention rightfully has fallen upon the efforts to get rid of Scott Walker, the goggle-eyed homunculus hired by Koch Industries to manage its midwest subsidiary formerly known as the state of Wisconsin, there are some signs that the various energetic gnomes at work in the Republican base who just tossed out the safest seat in the Senate in Indiana may be working to screw their own party further a little north of there. The undead spirits of Christine O'Donnell and Sharron Angle are walking the banks of the Fox River, howling for blood and hors d'oeuvres.

As it happens, there are three candidates running in the Republican primary to replace retiring Senator Herb Kohl, a Democrat. (The Democratic candidate, Rep. Tammy Baldwin, is running unopposed.) One of them is Tommy Thompson, a former governor, a former Cabinet official under Ronald Reagan, very briefly once a presidential candidate, and, for many years, the face of Republican politics in the state. Another candidate is Jeff Fitzgerald, the current speaker of the Wisconsin State Assembly, who is making the run despite having the Walker anchor tied to his ankles. (His older brother, Scott, is majority leader of the state senate and is facing a recall election of his own.) The third candidate is a former congressman named Mark Neumann and, boy howdy, are you going to love this guy. He makes Richard Mourdock, the guy who defenestrated Lugar in Indiana, look like Emma Goldman.

Not to put too fine a point on it, but Neumann, who was a foot soldier in the Gingrich revolution way back in the day, is completely batshit on the subject of gay people. Gay people make him feel icky, and Neumann is certain they make Jesus feel the same way. In 1997, he gave a speech to the local Christian Coalition and told them that he wouldn't even hire gay people to work in his office....

"If somebody walks in to me and say, 'I'm a gay person; I want a job in your office.' I would say, 'that's inappropriate' and they wouldn't be hired because that would mean they are promoting their agenda. The gay and lesbian lifestyle (is) unacceptable, lest there be any question about that."

(It should be noted that it was Scott Walker himself who saved the state from the experience of Governor Mark Neumann back in 2010, when Neumann tried so many twists and turns to explain his ongoing losing struggle with innate bigotry that his uvula got tangled with his pancreas.)

Now watch where you step because we're about to lower the bar here a tad, but, as modern Republicans go, Tommy Thompson is close to as good as you're going to get. His welfare reforms in Wisconsin, while not the greatest thing that ever happened to the state's poor people, at least contained committments to education and job-training, as opposed to the chuck-em-off-the-rolls theory put into practice by many of his fellows. And he has put together a plan for a high-speed rail system connecting all the hubs in the midwest from Cincinnati to St. Louis, and north all the way to Minneapolis, that has the strong support of former Massachusetts governor Michael Dukakis, who cares more about trains than any man I've ever met. He is honorable, decent, and, in my experience, almost amiable. He also is the only one of the three that polling data says would beat Baldwin straight up. Mark Fitzgerald is a nebbish, and Mark Neumann is a nutcase.

So, naturally, fresh off their triumph in Indiana, those fine folks at the Club For Growth have launched an ad blitz in Wisconsin in favor of... the nutcase!

(Also, too: The nutcase has garnered the support of Senators Tom Coburn and Rand Paul, and, as Guy Clark once put it, there's a pair to draw to, son. He's also got Jim DeMint's More Loons Like Me! PAC lining up behind him.)

Why is the Club For Growth choosing to abandon what is an enormously winnable race for an open U.S. Senate seat to launch attacks on a guy who used to work for St. Ronnie? Well, let failed congresscritter Chris (The Count) Chocola explain it all to you:

Today, Thompson still appears as an endorsement of this pro-ObamaCare group along with Obama and Tammy Baldwin, a far-left Wisconsin Congressman who is running as a Democrat for the same Senate seat. He served on their board of directors from at least 2009-2010. While Mark Neumann and the rest of you were fighting ObamaCare, Thompson was saddling up to President Obama and helping his labor allies pass it. That's a fact, and it's indisputable.

Yes, Tommy Thompson belonged to a group that endorsed the Affordable Care Act which, of course, contained the famous Heritage Foundation notion of the individual mandate. And that, of course, is enough for the Club For Growth to blundering in with its buckets of corporate money and cast him as a liberal RINO who's ready to sell out the legacy of Ronald Reagan, for whom he actually worked back when a complete tool like Chris Chocola was in high school. And, of course, the Club itself — which is really all about the economy, you know — has no compunction about lining up behind a guy whose only real public profile is that of a raving gay-baiter.

Look, I don't care how many of their own eyeballs the Republicans want to pop out and eat like Jujubes, but stupid politics makes me crazy, and what happened in Indiana was stupid politics, and if these people connive to throw Mark Neumann into a race against Tammy Baldwin, who just happens to be an out gay woman, which ought to make just a dandy campaign all around, they deserve to live with the idea of majority leader Harry Reid for the rest of their natural lives.